“... War. I concentrate for the moment on The Pisan Cantos because that seems to me, as it does to Anthony Woodward, Pound’s ‘greatest achievement’. Everything that had begun to go wrong with The Cantos – their obsessive, one-dimensional quality in that forced march the reader takes through Cantos 52 to 71 – is righted at Pisa; and if literature in ...”

“... in these pages that he found the whole affair boring – ‘cold mutton’, as he said about the Anthony Blunt affair. Perhaps he did. Historians are queer. Still, boredom is ruder than execration. I have nearly finished imitating A.J.P. Taylor’s rhythms now. Let me add this. I once wrote a whole book in what I conceived to be his style – short, choppy ...”

“... elites created a continent-wide identity, which one Anglo-Saxon writer under the patronage of King Alfred of Wessex in the ninth century termed ‘Christendom’. This now anonymous scholar had translated a four-century-old world history written in Latin by the Roman Christian writer Orosius. His audience of Anglo-Saxons were determined to unite ...”

“... fellow which you see before us; I say that sloven, if we should come to have a breach with the King (which God forbid), in such case will be one of the greatest men in England.’Cromwell started the First Civil War even before Charles I raised his droopy standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642, by seizing most of the silver plate the Cambridge colleges ...”

“... and was among those executed after the rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of ...”

“... the Queen of Romania, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught, and less frequently King Edward VII. Rose quotes one of Nancy’s ‘most celebrated bons mots’: when invited by the King to play bridge, she is said to have refrained with the claim: ‘Why I don’t even know the difference between a ...”

“... written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His Life of Carlyle, published in 1885, inaugurated modern biography, biography with no ...”

“... Fox sisters, after John Beavis’s own father, the surgeon, how could there be?’ Beavis’s son Anthony – Aldous, as we apprehend – is overwhelmed by the enveloping gloom: ‘He walked as though at the bottom of a moving well. Its black walls rustled all around him. He began to cry.’ Two years after his mother’s death, inflammation of the cornea ...”

“... raised to dignity and wealth by Mazel’s gift of good luck, manages to milk a lioness to cure the King; when bad luck has his turn, he spoils his good fortune by saying it is dog’s milk. His fortunes are ruined, for a while, anyway. Again the drawings – in this case brush-drawings by Margot Zemach, rather in the manner of Ben Shahn – are not strictly ...”

“... impression that he had never heard of any of these people before he met and quarrelled with Sir Anthony Part at the Department of Industry. The Civil Service mandarins seem to have driven him back to a glorious time when the King had his head chopped off and all his civil service supporters fled for their lives. Even more ...”

“... the reality was another matter. He knew that his real home had been the condemned playground. Anthony Powell comments on the odd fact that Connolly’s chosen and not uncherished home in later years was not some castle in Spain or a Dordogne farmhouse but a bald redbrick villa in an Eastbourne street, well away from the sea but not so far from his ...”

“... presidential election. One of the few US commentators to have an understanding of Iraqi politics, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, writes that ‘Iraqis may be deeply divided along sectarian, ethnic, tribal and factional lines,’ but they nevertheless ‘have a national consciousness, a great deal of ...”

“... of American resolve is in prospect, the figure of Hitler is as difficult to exclude as the head of King Charles. The drawback in the analogy is that, from a Hitler, it is impossible to demand much less than his complete destruction or unconditional surrender. Still, other keywords such as ‘expansion’ and ‘poison gas’ do keep on creeping in. Partly as a ...”

“... material. You only had to look around and speculate – for example, on a film poster in which Nat King Cole is airbrushed from his seat and the blonde white singer left standing beside the piano without an accompanist. The idea was to entertain, raise spirits, to report on the talent pouring out of the townships, the energy, the razzmatazz, the musicians, the ...”

“... is built on a familiar Redgrove system which might be called the Midas Variation. Everything that King Midas touched turned to gold. In the Midas Variation everything that Peter Redgrove touches turns to one thing, be it stone or clocks or bees or wasps or, in this case, pure horse manure: He is going to horse-worship at the Races. Everything about him ...”